Shows / New Books in American Studies
New Books in American Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in American Studies
Anne Searcy, "Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange" (Oxford UP, 2020)
During the Cold War, cultural diplomacy was one way that the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union tried to cultivate goodwill towards their…
- New Books in American Studies
Bing West, "The Last Platoon: A Novel of the Afghanistan War" (Bombardier Books, 2020)
The Last Platoon: A Novel of the Afghanistan War (Bombardier Books, 2020) is a riveting book of infantry ground combat. As a work of fiction it is superb…
- New Books in American Studies
Brad A. Jones, "Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic" (Cornell UP, 2021)
The American Revolution has traditionally been presented as one of the thirteen colonies standing up to a tyrannical empire. Not only does this gloss over the…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Rosino, "Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and Media in the War on Drugs Debate" (Routledge, 2021)
Since President Nixon coined the phrase, the "War on Drugs" has presented an important change in how people view and discuss criminal justice practices and…
- New Books in American Studies
Elyssa Ford, "Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Race, Gender, and Identity in the American Rodeo" (UP of Kansas, 2020)
Imagine a rodeo rider atop a bucking bronco, hat in hand, straining to remain astride. Is the rider in your mind's eye white? Is the person male? Popular…
- New Books in American Studies
Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, "America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights" (U Missouri Press, 2020)
The Community Relations Service (CRS) came into being alongside the Voting Rights Act—as part of the Act itself. And this organization was integrated into the…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher R. Dietrich, "A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present" (John Wiley & Sons, 2020)
The field of US foreign-relations history is not what it used to be, and that’s a good thing. Earlier historians narrowly defined the field as diplomatic…
- New Books in American Studies
Danielle Fuentes Morgan, "Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the 21st Century" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
The election of Barack Obama propelled the idea of a post-racial United States, or that the country had moved beyond race as a defining feature of social…
- New Books in American Studies
Monique M. Ingalls, "Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community" (Oxford UP, 2018)
The choices that churches make about their musical style do more than simply change the sounds one hears in their gatherings, but actually form certain kinds…
- New Books in American Studies
Dennis McDougal, "Operation White Rabbit: LSD, the DEA, and the Fate of the Acid King" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)
Operation White Rabbit: LSD, the DEA, and the Fate of the Acid King (Simon and Schuster, 2020) traces the rise and fall—and rise and fall again—of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Rory Kress, "The Doggie in the Window: How One Dog Led Me from the Pet Store to the Factory Farm to Uncover the Truth of Where Puppies Really Come From" (Sourcebooks, 2018)
When journalist Rory Kress met Izzie, she didn’t think twice before bringing her home. She found the twelve-week-old wheaten terrier in a pet shop and was…
- New Books in American Studies
Roundtable on Asian Migrant Sex Work
This episode features three interviews with organizers and scholars concerned with Asian migrant sex work: SWAN Vancouver (Alison Clancey and Kelly Go), Dr…
- New Books in American Studies
Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the…
- New Books in American Studies
Jack Glazier, "Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race" (MSU Press, 2020)
Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas, and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet…
- New Books in American Studies
Amanda Ann Klein, "Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV's Transition to Reality Programming" (Duke UP, 2021)
In Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming (Duke University Press, 2021), Dr. Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical…
- New Books in American Studies
David Ostrowsky, "Pro Sports in 1993: A Signature Season in Football, Basketball, Hockey and Baseball" (McFarland, 2020)
America and Canada both saw historic sports milestones in 1993. While the Dallas Cowboys and Chicago Bulls reigned supreme, the Toronto Blue Jays won a second…
- New Books in American Studies
Lucas Richert, "Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture" (MIT Press, 2020)
"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The…
- New Books in American Studies
Cristina V. Groeger, "The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Education is thought to be the route out of poverty, but history disagrees. For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic…
- New Books in American Studies
Lindsay Thomas, "Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
In Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security After 9/11 (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), author Lindsay Thomas studies the relationship…
- New Books in American Studies
M. I. Devine, "Warhol's Mother's Pantry: Art, America, and the Mom in Pop" (Mad Creek Books, 2020)
In Warhol's Mother's Pantry: Art America and the Mom in Pop (Mad Creek Press, 2020), M.I. Devine introduces readers to a collection of 21st-century multi-genre…
- New Books in American Studies
Daina R. Berry and Kali N. Gross, "A Black Women's History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2020)
Today I talked to Kali Nicole Gross about her new book (co-authored with Daina Ramey Berry) A Black Women's History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020)…
- New Books in American Studies
Lucas Bessire, "Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains" (Princeton UP, 2021)
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much…
- New Books in American Studies
Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, "African American Political Thought: A Collected History" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Political theorists Melvin Rogers and Jack “Chip” Turner have produced a truly magisterial edited volume centering the work by African American thinkers over…
- New Books in American Studies
Thomas C. Holt, "The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2021)
The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in…
- New Books in American Studies
Mary Ann Cherry, "Morris Kight: Humanist, Liberationist, Fantabulist: A Story of Gay Rights and Gay Wrongs" (Process, 2020)
How did the gay movement, which began as a sedate group of intellectuals, become what is arguably the most dynamic civil rights crusade in America? How did a…
- New Books in American Studies
Douglas A. Sweeney and Jan Stievermann, "The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards" (Oxford UP, 2021)
The Oxford Handbook of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford UP, 2021) offers a state-of-the-art summary of scholarship on Edwards by a diverse, international, and…
- New Books in American Studies
Elizabeth L. Jemison, "Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South" (UNC Press, 2020)
Elizabeth L. Jemison, who teaches American religious history at Clemson University, South Carolina, has written an outstanding new book, Christian Citizens…
- New Books in American Studies
Roberto Lovato, "Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas" (Harper, 2020)
The child of Salvadoran immigrants, Roberto Lovato grew up in 1970s and 80s San Francisco as MS-13 and other notorious Salvadoran gangs were forming in…
- New Books in American Studies
Crawford Gribben, "Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest" (Oxford UP, 2021)
In America's Pacific Northwest a group of conservative Protestants have been conducting a new experiment in cultural transformation. Dissatisfied with what…
- New Books in American Studies
Saher Selod, "Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror" (Rutgers UP, 2018)
How does a specific American religious identity acquire racial meaning? What happens when we move beyond phenotypes and include clothing, names, and behaviors…
- New Books in American Studies
Tyler Sonnichsen, "Capitals of Punk: DC, Paris, and Circulation in the Urban Underground" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
This one's personal. Tyler Sonnichsen's Capitals of Punk: DC, Paris, and Circulation in the Urban Underground (Palgrave, 2019) was an amazing book for me to…
- New Books in American Studies
Zach Sell, "Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital" (UNC Press, 2021)
The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi…
- New Books in American Studies
Chuck Collins, "The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions" (Polity, 2021)
For decades, a secret army of tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers has been developing into the shadowy Wealth Defense Industry. These ‘agents of…
- New Books in American Studies
Karen Woods Weierman, "The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston" (U Massachusetts Press, 2019)
In 1836, an enslaved six-year-old girl named Med was brought to Boston by a woman from New Orleans who claimed her as property. Learning of the girl's arrival…
- New Books in American Studies
Nate Chinen, "Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century" (Vintage, 2019)
Nate Chinen's Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (Vintage, 2019) is an essential guide to 21st century jazz. Named a best book of the year by NPR, GQ…
- New Books in American Studies
David A. Less, "Memphis Mayhem: A Story of the Music That Shook Up the World" (ECW Press, 2020)
Today I talked to David A. Lees about his book Memphis Mayhem: A Story of the Music That Shook Up the World (ECW Press, 2020) David Less has studied Memphis…
- New Books in American Studies
Elisabeth Piller, "Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918-1933" (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020)
In the decade after World War I, German-American relations improved swiftly. While resentment and bitterness ran high on both sides in 1919, Weimar Germany and…
- New Books in American Studies
Karen Stollznow, "On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Whether framed as complaints about cancel culture or as increased awareness of prejudice, stories about offensive language are common in our daily news cycle…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael Kluger and Richard Evans, "Roosevelt's and Churchill's Atlantic Charter: A Risky Meeting at Sea that Saved Democracy" (Naval Institute Press, 2021)
Winston Churchill was no stranger to storms. They had engulfed him in various ways throughout his long career and he had always turned to face them with…
- New Books in American Studies
Angela Firkus, "America's Early Women Celebrities: The Famous and Scorned from Martha Washington to Silent Film Star Mary Fuller" (McFarland, 2021)
Hello Everyone and welcome back to New Books in History, a network on the New Books Network. I’m Jana Byars, your host, and I’m here today with Angela Firkus…
- New Books in American Studies
Richard V. Barbuto, "New York's War of 1812: Politics, Society, and Combat" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
From its use as a staging ground for invasions of Canada to the blockading of its ports, New York found itself at the forefront of America’s war with Great…
- New Books in American Studies
Jeffrey Shandler, "Yiddish: Biography of a Language" (Oxford UP, 2020)
The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it…
- New Books in American Studies
Aaron Griffith, "God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America" (Harvard UP, 2020)
The rise of Neo-Evangelicalism as a social and political American movement accompanied shifting attitudes in broader American criminal justice policies…
- New Books in American Studies
Courtney E. Thompson, "An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of…
- New Books in American Studies
Thomas C. Hubka, "How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900-1940" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the average American family still lived by kerosene light, ate in the kitchen, and used an outhouse. By 1940, electric…
- New Books in American Studies
Bryce Traister, "American Literature and the New Puritan Studies" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Bryce Traister has edited a collection of 13 original essays exploring the shifting landscape in the historiography of American Puritanism in American…
- New Books in American Studies
Steven Blush, "Bustin' Balls: World Team Tennis 1974-1978, Pro Sports, Pop Culture and Progressive Politics" (Feral Press, 2020)
Steven Blush's new book Bustin' Balls (Feral Press, 2020) tells the strange but true story of World Team Tennis (1974-1978) that attempted to transform the…
- New Books in American Studies
Linda Heidenreich, "Nepantla Squared: Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
In the Nahuatl language, nepantla refers to the ancient Mesoamerican “philosophy that views the world through motion-change,” binding past, present and…
- New Books in American Studies
Max Edling, "Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution" (Oxford UP, 2020)
On the face of things, the Constitution is concerned with individual and collective rights - to free speech, assembly, religion and that part about guns…
- New Books in American Studies
Cas Mudde, "The Far Right Today" (Polity, 2019)
What is the difference between Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? Why should we understand Trump as part of a…
- New Books in American Studies
Dying from Despair in the USA: A Discussion with Anne Case
Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern…
- New Books in American Studies
J. DeLapp-Birkett and Aaron Sherber, "Appalachian Spring: Original Ballet Version" (A-R Edtions, 2019)
Premiered in 1944, Appalachian Spring is a ballet developed in a close collaboration between the composer Aaron Copland and choreographer Martha Graham. It is…
- New Books in American Studies
Jonathan S. Holloway, "The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans" (Oxford UP, 2021)
What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being…
- New Books in American Studies
Liat Ben-Moshe, "Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities…
- New Books in American Studies
William C. Kashatus, "William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia" (U Notre Dame Press, 2021)
William Still looms large in the history of the Underground Railroad, both for his role coordinating the Eastern Line and the records he maintained of the…
- New Books in American Studies
Edward A. David, "A Christian Approach to Corporate Religious Theory" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
How does individual religious liberty apply to religiously affiliated groups? Edward A. David investigates the polarized ways legal theorists seek to…
- New Books in American Studies
B. Brian Foster, "I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life" (UNC Press, 2020)
Brian Foster, self-identified Black boy from rural Mississippi, joins us today for a conversation about his book, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the…
- New Books in American Studies
Christopher T. Stout, "The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals" (U Virginia Press, 2020)
The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals (University of Virginia Press, 2020) dives into the discussion and debate…
- New Books in American Studies
Michael P. F. Smith, "The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown" (Viking, 2021)
Today I talked to Michael P. F. Smith about his book The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown (Viking, 2021)…
- New Books in American Studies
Monica D. Fitzgerald, "Puritans Behaving Badly: Gender, Punishment, and Religion in Early America" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
The Puritans of Early America did not start out with gendered society and piety. Instead, Monica D. Fitzerald suggests, growing tensions between lay men and…